Episode 12: Chris Lema and Beyond Good

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Chris and I talk about all sorts of stuff in this episode, all surrounding his site Beyond Good. We talk about tools, automation, and being a one-man show doing the work of a small company. Chris also shares some exclusive advice on creating content. Make sure to listen until the end!

Show Notes

Transcript

Joe:
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Hey, everybody. Welcome to another episode of “How I Built It”, the podcast that asks, “How did you build that?” Today, I am here with my good friend, WordPress person, cigar aficionado, Chris Lema. Chris, how are you doing?

Chris:
I’m great. How are you doing?

Joe:
Good, very good. Thanks so much for joining me today. Today, we are going to talk about your website, beyondgood.com. Is that correct?

Chris:
That’s right.

Joe:
All right, cool. Let’s just jump right into it. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about you, the product, and how you came up with this idea.

Chris:
Sure. I am a guy who’s been blogging for five and a half years almost predominately around WordPress, and yet a lot of what I do in my day job is leading people and managing people, and I’ve been doing that for about 20 years. I decided I wanted to spin up a new site where I could focus on the leadership side of things. I bought the domain name “Beyond Good”, spun up the website, and now I’m rolling out all of the features. It’s been several months in progress just to get some core content in place and now start building out all the rest of the membership site and the store, and all the things that go with a website when you put it all together. Of course, it’s sitting on top of WordPress, so it leverages all the things I normally write about on ChrisLema.com, but I wanted a dedicated place where people could go if they just were looking at leadership stuff.

Joe:
Nice, and you were my boss at Crowd Favorite a little bit for awhile, my direct boss. You manage primarily software people. Is that correct?

Chris:
Yeah, for the most part. I’ve done some work in nonprofits, but the 21 years of hardcore leadership management have all been leading people smarter than me.

Joe:
Nice, I’m sure most programmers, because of the way most of us think, would agree with that. I necessarily would not. Programmers can be, I can say this because I’m one of them, we can kind of be a pain in the neck to manage, so this seems like a really great blog that’s probably helpful to a lot of people. You’ve been doing this for a long time, so did you do any specific research for this product or is this like mostly a brain-dump or some combination?

Chris:
The content itself comes from not only two decades of leading folks, but I actually have, and we were chatting with a friend at a conference this last week where I said, “I actually have a Masters degree in leadership.” They were like, “Are you kidding me?” I’m like, “No.” I didn’t want an MBA, but wanted to do more reading and research and writing in this space, so I went and got one. In some ways, you could say there’s a lot of research behind this. On the flip side, the reality is when you’re talking about building out a new product, whether your talking about website or a website with a store and selling books and all of that kind of stuff, part of what you have to do is figure out: Is there an audience for this?

That’s where most people rush in. Buy a domain. Get a website. Roll it out. Get going, and then they’re like, “Huh, nothing’s happening.” I move a lot slower, building not only the content, but starting to build and do the research to figure out: What’s the network of people? What are the relationships and dynamics that I have to have make this win. In point of fact, for this website before the first post went online, I have a spreadsheet of the top 300 folks that blog about leadership. I have them ranked in terms of the number of posts they output, in terms of the number of comments they get on average per post. I have a list of the top 100 people that have written books on Amazon about leadership. I have an average setting of the stars that they’ve gotten on reviews of the sum total of their books, plus the total number of their books.

Again, normally we don’t talk about all of this, but when I go to research into a space, I make sure that I know who the players are. What’s the content? I’m not going to try and jump into the top leadership blogger and say, “Hey, can you post back or link back to me?” Because that’s ridiculous, right? They get those requests every day. On the flip side, if you can create your own algorithm for ranking all of this data into how you would score these people about this topic or about any topic, if you can create your algorithm, and then rank it, and you start at the bottom, and you start back linking and creating links and relationships and comments at the bottom, and then they start giving you reciprocal love, and then you start moving up your chain, eventually you get to the top folks. This is essentially what I did five years ago in the WordPress space.

Today, I have a lot of connections to a lot of people that are very important in the WordPress ecosystem, but I didn’t start there. You start at the bottom and you build your way up. When I bring particularly a content-oriented product to market, part of what I’m saying in that space is I’ve done the homework to figure out: Who are the players? What’s the lay of the land look like so that I’m not just stepping into it and I might step on a landmine?

Joe:
That makes perfect sense. If you were a baseball player or a football player, you wouldn’t go into a game not knowing anything about the team that you’re about to play against.

Chris:
Exactly right.

Joe:
Forming relationships is one of the most important thing. I did the same thing with WP in one month. I could do the beginner WordPress stuff, but I’m not going to. Shawn Hesketh is in that space and is doing it much better than I would do it. I talked to him. I talked to Corey Miller and a few other people about, “Hey, you guys are doing this. Where can I fit in without stepping on your toes?” That’s just great advice. Kind of transitioning into that, you give tons of advice on clarity. Actually, you’re the one who got me onto clarity, so I know that a lot of people seek out your advice. Do you talk to people about ideas that you have floating around, advice on how to make things work and things like that?

Chris:
I do. I’m a huge believer in collecting opinions, whether or not I agree with them and whether or not I obey them. That’s my prerogative. At the end of the day, I have to make the call, but the old paradigm of, “I’m going to do all of this in silence and never talk to anyone so that it can be a secret because someone might steal my idea,” really is kind of dead. Obviously, I’m not running hedge fund, but in this space, I talk to a lot of folks, and I walk through a lot of stuff. I’m really good friends with several leadership bloggers that are far further ahead in it. I’m like, “That’s fine. I want to take a little, particular space.” One of these little corners I want to focus on is particular the angle of storytelling and leadership. In team management and leadership, there’s a couple of little angles. I go, “Those are the only angles I want to take.” Then you start having these conversations with people, and you starting going, “What do you think about this? Would you buy a book on this?” What’s the angle here?

Obviously, I speak at a lot of conferences, and so over the last several months, most of my topics have been storytelling in leadership as a way to constantly evaluate the content and evaluate: What sticks? What doesn’t? It’s amazing. You give a talk and you think, “That didn’t go as well as I thought it might.” It’s its own feedback, right? Whether I’m doing it one-on-one collecting advise, or whether I’m doing that in a group in an audience setting back and forth, you’re always trying to collect feedback to help you then say, “Now that I have data, which of this data strikes me as really true or helpful, and then you start course correcting.”

Joe:
Speaking at conferences, doing things in a real life space is great feedback. I’ve taught classes, and I’d give a bad lecture and my students wouldn’t have to say anything. It would be written all over their faces, just like, “What did you just say?”

Chris:
Exactly right.

Joe:
I know a lot of people have a phobia about speaking, but if you can just go to WordPress meet ups, or whatever meet up. It doesn’t have to be WordPress.

Chris:
Just a meet up. A meet up is so great. If you don’t like it or if you bomb, you don’t ever have to go to that meet up again.

Joe:
Yeah, that’s exactly right, and it’s super low pressure. Even speaking at a WordCamp is pretty low pressure. The community is very accepting. Find small places locally and just talk to people and get your ideas out there and get real world feedback. This site is on top of WordPress, but what else can you tell us about it? How did you build it?

Chris:
It is sitting on WPEngine as a host, and on top of that. It runs WordPress, layered on top of WordPress, obviously, you need a theme. This particular theme framework is the Genesis Framework from StudioPress. They have a boilerplate free child theme that I’m using because a lot of the custom page design work will be done with another plugin called Beaver Builder. Genesis is the base, and so for all the stuff that you see that are just the display of the articles, that is just the baseline Genesis and the free Child theme. When you go to landing pages, obviously, any of the landing pages and some of the commerce pages are customized by a plugin called Beaver Builder which lets you do a bunch of different layout work for WordPress.

Then, of course, the moment you get into buying something, whether your talking about buying a t-shirt, buying a book, buying membership, that is all sitting on top of WooCommerce. I tell people, “If you’re going to build a membership site, and there’s no commerce related. The transaction is a membership piece, but you’re not going to sell anything else, especially not any physical goods, then I typically go with Member Press.” But, in this particular case where I would be selling physical goods, I decided to go with WooCommerce, and if you’re going to go with WooCommerce, then the membership and subscriptions extensions: Subscriptions is ProsPress, and memberships is SkyVerge. Both of those are maybe my two favorite extensions of the entire WooCommerce line.

Obviously, WooCommerce is free, but subscriptions I think is $199 for a site, memberships is $149 for a single site, and you go, “Okay, wow. That’s a little bit of money.” It is worth every single penny. I’ve said this before. Nobody has done the level of work and detail and understanding of subscriptions as the folks at ProsPress. I remember two or three years ago, I wrote a ridiculously long blog post about the fact that most of the subscription code in WordPress sucked, and it was a polite conversation, but it was still a, “You guys don’t understand what it is to pause and restart a subscription. You don’t know what it’s like to upgrade a subscription midstream and prorate and recalculate and assign previous existing spend against new spend and new requirements of whatever the new plan that you did. The upgrade. There’s no way to do a downgrade and prorate. The guys at ProssPress basically, Brent and everyone there, just went, “Okay.” First everyone said, “No, we’re not going to do it.” Most people didn’t do it.

Then Brent said, “Okay, we’re going to do it.” They have killed it. They have done remarkable work, and again, on the Member Press side, too, Blair has done a lot to add that, too. The subscriptions code base is incredible. Recently, I met with the folks at SkyVerge to say, “What I really would like is for you to detach membership and subscription even though they work together, so that I could say that I want something to be paid for in three payments, but I want the membership to last a year.” I want three monthly payments, because you’re accruing all of that value upfront. Someone signs into “Beyond Good” as a member, and they’re like, “Oh, my gosh.” They’re going to go and get all the value out of reading all those different posts and all of that stuff early. I want to be able to monetize that within the first two months or three months. I don’t want them to be paying in month six, seven, eight, but I want them to have access for 12 months.

The new membership extension just rolled that new feature out that I can separate the two. Doing all of that. Then it gets more fun because of my good friends over at Zapier, which some people say Zapier, I think that’s how you actually say it because it makes you happier. That’s how I remember it now. I’ve heard Zapper and Zapier, and lots of different ways to say it, but they are a platform for connecting dots. What’s really cool about the dot connect they do is they open the world up to a lot of other possibilities. If you become a member of “Beyond Good”, if you sign up and become a member, you pay something. The moment you pay, that goes through Stripe. That’s the integration I’m using for payment. The moment you hit Stripe, Stripe now has a record of the fact that you did a transaction, a certain volume of money, a certain descriptor in the tag.

I parse that with Zapier so that I can see that you actually paid me through Stripe, but I have 16 different sites that are coming in through Stripe and paying money, so I look at not only the amount, but I also look at the descriptor. When I have the right descriptor, this is the “Beyond Good” membership, I can then use Zapier to say, “Okay, pull that one out. Listen to that one, and connect the dots to other places.” In this case, I can send you a custom postcard that says, “Hey, thanks for joining up,” because Zapier has a postcard partner. You go, “This is perfect. This is what I like. I can also send you a t-shirt.” You look at Spread Shirt, I think, which also has a connection. I can send you, again, in this case it’s a free t-shirt, that basically is a thank you for joining. Thank you for being a member. You can walk around wearing whatever.

I have to look up specifically which. I think I was using Lob. Lob are the folks that do the custom post cards. They also can do posters and other things like that, so it’s not just post cards, but that’s very cool. On the t-shirt side, I’m trying to remember which one I was using. I’ll have to log in and actually see which player, but the benefit of using Zapier is that you can do more than the code that you have specifically in WooCommerce or specifically in WordPress. That’s where it gets really powerful. The last bit of it is I can also use all of the same stuff that we’re talking about with Zapier connected to Agile CRM and Agile CRM is my CRM program. I use Zapier to take every time you purchase anything, and I move you into my CRM and I add tags, so like, “Hey, you bought the “Beyond Good” membership, but you also commented at ChrisLema.com, and you also went and bought Membership Huddle, which is another membership website that I run. Oh, and we see that you took the storytellers café class at ChrisLema.com.”

I can start tagging these people, give them more points or more scoring or whatever to say, “There are important people,” which allows me then to send custom invitations and/or discounts for something else. The benefit of WooCommerce, the benefit obviously of WordPress and then WooCommerce, and then using memberships and subscriptions to create more than just a regular store, and then using Zappier to connect to other resources that let’s you look like and feel like a bigger company; custom postcards, custom t-shirts, and then get all of that data back into my CRM is what makes this whole thing a lot of fun without writing tremendous amounts of code.

Joe:
Or doing it yourself. If you didn’t have Zapier, you’d have to print off your own postcards, and then when an order came in, send it out yourself, which is really time consuming. More time consuming than the monthly subscription you pay for Zapier.

Chris:
The t-shirt player is called Startup Threads.

Joe:
Startup Threads. All right, everything that Chris just mentioned I have in the show notes, so you don’t have to take notes furiously or anything like that. It’ll all be there for you. That is a lot of great tools, and you didn’t touch any code or that, right?

Chris:
No, Joe. I am glad to say that I could build, you can like if you’re speed timing this thing, and you know what you’re doing, and you have it in your head, you can build everything I described in half a day on a Saturday because it’s literally just layering in the different components and then connecting some dots and then making sure. It’s not code, but you have to make sure. The mistake I made the first time I was doing something with Zapier and Stripe was I just said, “Listen for this, and if the price is this, do whatever.” I forgot that I had other things going through Stripe. All of a sudden, these people are getting tagged in correctly in my CRM, and I’m like, “What’s going on.” You go, “Oh, I need to parse the descriptor because the amount.” I was charging in two different sites. I was charging $99, and then if somebody sends me money a different way, but it all comes in through Stripe and hits as $99, that’s just not a good way to do it.

You learn some little lessons, but fundamentally, once you start parsing the descriptor, and then you start building out from there. Zapier has not only matches, but they have definitely “not’s”, so you can also say, “If it matches this string, but is not this string.” You can put some logic into that engine so that you’re protected. Then the trick is finding players like Lob and like Startup Threads, because you’re like, “Someone must be doing this.” It turns out making t-shirt, everybody makes t-shirt. I created a video on making a t-shirt. In fact, I have a different store that is a t-shirt site with WooCommerce that is using Printful, I think. It’s great. There’s video that shows you how to do it, but I can’t do anything in an automated way where I say, “If you sign up for a membership, you get automatically sent this one t-shirt for free.” I can’t do that with Zapier because it doesn’t – Printful and Zapier don’t talk to each other – but Startup Threads and Zapier do.

Part of the work is researching which of the tools that connect, which of the tools that are available to me, and how can I leverage them the most. Most people, once they get their minds set on, “I’m going to X or I’m going to do Y.” That’s where they stop looking. Part of the job is to keep looking at: What are all the things that are available to me? How can I sweeten this up and make this easier? How can I make my life easier? How can I automate more, so that I have less to do and the thing is running as a smooth engine?

Joe:
Right, so there was no dev time, but there’s still a ton of testing time, right? Getting stuck or set on something is definitely something you need to be mindful of. I was working on a project where I was certain I would use PM Pro. Jason Coleman is a good friend of mine. He was the first guest on the show, and for the minimum viable product, I decided to nix memberships because they didn’t make a whole lot of sense at first launch. Now I’m reconsidering using PM Pro because there is something that integrates with WooCommerce a little better, a little easier without me having to write code. That’s not to say that PM Pro is not a great product because I think it is. I’m talking to a memberships expert here, but it’s not necessarily the right tool for the job.

Chris:
Right, and so the trick always is who’s the person who’s using it? If we’re talking to an audience that are all developers, PM Pro and Restrict Content Pro are fantastic products. They have a bunch of hooks and you can do a lot, but if you’re talking to an audience of people who are young programmers or not programmers at all, PM Pro can get scary because what happens is it has all the infrastructure you need. Then you’re like, “Oh, I need this other add-on.” Then you’re like, “How do you do this?” You send a note to Jason, who’s a really awesome dude, and Jason sends you back a little bit of code. “Oh, just drop this in whether it’s your functions file or some other place.” I know people who literally stop right there and go, “I can’t do anything because he sent me code and this code could break my whole site if I put it in the wrong place.”

It really can’t, but I understand the fear. Different products are better for different kinds of audiences. For me, when I go and build all of this stuff with membership and subscriptions and store and everything else on top of WooCommerce, what I’m looking for is that connection between the people who are building an extension for WooCommerce and the people who are building WooCommerce because I can’t afford for those things to get out of sync. If you’re a little further away, if you’re Restrict Content Pro or PM Pro or a bunch of the other players, they’re kind of watching maybe a little bit of what WooCommerce just rolled out and figuring out if they have to do something. But SkyVerge and ProsPress are tight in and hooked in and constantly updating, so I want to make sure all of these pieces are working well together so that I don’t have to worry about. When there’s an update to one or an update to another, it’s not going to break the whole site.

Joe:
That makes perfect sense. That is you put a whole lot of things together. You’ve launched the site. Right now, articles are out there, but is the store live? Are the memberships live?

Chris:
It’s all coming live here in the next couple of weeks. By the time people hear this episode, it may all be live, or if not, it’s a week or two away. It’s all launching this year, and when I left Crowd Favorite, part of what I said I do is I take some time off before I join whatever next company or do whatever next thing, and one of the things I wanted to do was launch “Beyond Good” and get up and running so that I had not only ChrisLema.com as a place where I was blogging, but another place where I could blog about things that weren’t WordPress.

Joe:
Nice, and so this is a relatively new product. Do you have a lot of plans for the future or maybe what are your general plans for the future? Whatever you want to talk about here.

Chris:
Yeah, so I have for the site, I have a book, a couple of t-shirts for sale. It’s a fairly substantive ebook on storytelling and leadership that is, I think we’re now 12 chapters in, and so I’m still writing. It’s a couple thousand words a day of punching out content separate from the blog posts themselves. There’s a book. There’s some t-shirts. There’s a membership that will get you access to a little mastermind group, so trying to connect the dots between not just me giving other people information, but how do we get little groups of people connecting and talking about leadership. I hope to get all of that in play and then figure out for me personally what are the next steps because obviously, one of the things that you don’t do when you’re working as a consultant, for the most part, you don’t lead people. I am doing a lot of consulting where I’m writing assessments and looking at evaluations, and I’m giving advice, and I’m creating models and spreadsheets of revenue generation and all of these things, but it’s all just me.

One of the things I love doing is leading people, so at some point I may look at joining a larger company where I get to do that. That’s some of what we’re evaluating now. We, my wife and I, as we talk through, what are the different opportunities and what makes sense, and of course, you’ve been to my home. We’re not leaving San Diego, so everything gets filtered through the, “But I still get to smoke my cigars in my hot tub.”

Joe:
Yes, which is a very important thing to do. When I go out to California, I try to make it a point to go there because smoking cigars in the hot tub is a highlight of being in that state.

Chris:
That’s right.

Joe:
Before we get to the final question, actually, you turn out tons of content. Maybe this was your trade secret, but in case you had a different trade secret, I would love to ask how do you come up with a lot of good content?

Chris:
I think there’s two tricks to it. I don’t know if anyone’s ever asked the question because people just kind of shy away from how do you pull off all this content? Here they are. Exclusively for your audience. Number one, you have to spend time with people who you are trying to serve. You have to spend time with people who you’re trying to serve. A lot of us go, “Yeah, I do that.” But, it’s not true. If you’re a developer who’s writing articles for young people who are starting off their development journey, and all you do is spend with all of your developer friends who are all as mature as you and know all the things, you’re not spending time with the community you’re serving, and you don’t have a clue.

Joe, when you teach a class, you teach a class to young people, so you really are engaging with that newbie, and you know what it looks like when you say something that is maybe three steps ahead of where you need to be, and you look at their eyeballs and their eyeballs are like, “I don’t have a clue what you just said.” I’ve been in rooms where I’ve talked with people and said something like, “Do you want this site responsive?” They go, “Well, of course I want it to react to people.” You go, “Right, of course that’s what you meant by the word responsive. I was thinking something else, but now that I think about it, I’m the moron.”

The reality is that you have to connect with the people that you’re trying to serve and spend a lot of time there. What that does is it gives you a million questions. A million stories because those people are constantly asking like, “What if I want to do this?” In fact, my whole idea of the postcard piece came from a conversation that I had with a realtor who said, “Well, if someone signs up to my real estate website and wants to see my MOS’s, I also want to send them a direct piece. How do I do that?” I went, “I don’t know.” Don’t you have a virtual assistant in an office that will just make it up and ship it out? They go, “But what if I want to automate it?” I’m like, “There must be automation for postcards. Let’s go look. There must be someone who connect to …” Then eventually you figure it out. Then one day you use it, and then another day you go write about it.

The more you spend time, the more you get all the questions and those question drive great content. The second thing is you’re goal when you write has to be to help someone else. I can’t tell you the number of times people have said, “Oh, Chris.” When you’re face-to-face and you’re chatting with them, and they’re like, “God, you’re really much smarter than you come across on your blog.” I think they mean as a complement. They follow it up with, “You should just write some really long, deep, even technical articles.” People who don’t know I have any technical background. “You should write something.” The people know what you know. I’m like, “Yeah, that’s not the objective. The objective is not to write a blog.” That’s called a diary, right? The objective is not to demonstrate all of my knowledge skills and prowess. The objective is to help someone else.

Normally, that means distilling it down. It means changing your language. It means shaping it to be helpful and it means focusing on answering those questions that you heard in part one of the two part secret here. What that does, is that just gives you a sense with that audience who’s reading a sense that you care about them, which is what you need to do to win. As you care, they give you more content because they send you more questions like, “How do I do this?” Some people get frustrated with that kind of stuff, like. “Oh, I got 42 emails this morning when I woke up because there were all of these different people writing questions about some article I wrote or something.” Or just randomly. They’re like, “You look like a helpful guy, why don’t I send all of my free questions to you?” People get upset, and I go, “no, that’s just them giving me content so I can turn around now and say let’s go write this answer.” That’s the secret.

Joe:
Nice, that’s awesome. Do you have another trade secret for us? Because that’s a really good. We could totally end on that.

Chris:
My trade secret is you don’t need one killer product. You don’t need one killer company. You don’t even need to sell your business for three million dollars, five million dollars, ten million dollars, 100 million dollars. Probably, the first $100,000 or $200,000 is going to change your life, and if that’s the case, it turns out that $100,000 to $200,000 is a lot easier to make from multiple revenue streams than from a single revenue stream, so my key and my takeaway and my suggest and my recommend is: Don’t build one product and put all of your eggs in that one basket. Slowly build several. I don’t know if “Beyond Good” is going to kill it, but frankly, I don’t need it to kill it. I just need it to produce a 2,000, 5,000, 10,000 a month revenue stream.

When you add that to another revenue stream like ChrisLema.com and another revenue stream from membershiphuddle.com and other revenue stream from Vemeo.com and you just keep layering revenue streams and eventually, you’re like, “you know if I quit my job today, I could go several months without working because the revenue streams are bringing in enough that I can sit in my hot tub and smoke some cigars and make some choices about my future without having rush into something.” I think most people think, I got to have that home-run hit, and my recommend is just be consistent in writing a lot of singles and doubles, but that means building out multiple properties, and maybe the last takeaway is don’t put your name on them.

I put Chris on … I can’t sell Chris … I can, but only to my friend Syed, who would gladly buy it, but I can’t sell ChrisLema.com because who’s going to write like Chris? But all the others are not with my name on it so that you also have the opportunity to take a single property if it connects to the right niche and you can just sell that and move on and let someone else pick it up.

Joe:
Man, that is great advice. I love the baseball analogy. People love the home run hitter, but the guy who has the 400 average probably contributes to the teams more, so that’s fantastic. Well, Chris, thank you so much for joining me today and talking about all of your stuff, and thanks to our sponsors, hover.com and WP Stagecoach, definitely check them out. If you enjoy the show, make sure to check us out and rate us on iTunes at How I Built It. Subscribe if you want, and please check out the Patreon over at patreon.com/howibuiltit. Until next time, get out there and build something.